My mistake. I'll remember that in the future.

If you were willing to point me to two or three of your favorite Internet writers, whom you consider reliably enjoyable and interesting and so forth, I might find that valuable for its own sake, and might also be better able to answer your question in mutually intelligible terms.

As a side issue, I'm dismayed upon finding that ideas I had thought original to Yudkowsky were secondhand.

Having to have original ideas is a very high standard. I doubt a single one of my posts contains a truly original idea, and I don't try–I try to figure out which ideas are useful to me, and then present why, in a format that I hope will be useful to others. Eliezer creates a lot of new catchy terms for pre-existing ideas, like "affective death spiral" for "halo effect." I like that.

His posts are also quite short, often witty, and generally presented in an easier-to-digest format than the journal articles I might otherwise have to read to encounter the not-new ideas. You apparently don't find his writing easy to digest or amusing in the same way I do.

As a side issue, I'm dismayed upon finding that ideas I had thought original to Yudkowsky were secondhand.

Are there specific examples? It seems to me that in most cases when he has a pre-existing idea he gives relevant sources.

I'm intrigued by what enjoyment readers here get from Yudkowsky's sequences. Why do you all find interesting what I find amateurish and inept?

I find his fictional interludes quite entertaining, because they are generally quite lively, and display a decent amount of world-building -- which is one aspect of science fiction and fantasy that I particularly enjoy. I also enjoy the snark he employs when trashing opposing ideas, especially when such ideas are quite absurd. Of course, the snark doesn't make his writing more persuasive -- just more entertaining.

he demonstrates mediocre literary skills when it comes to performances like varying his sentence structure

I know I'm exposing my ignorance here, but I'm not sure what this means; can you elaborate ?

I think the argument you make in this comment isn't a bad one, but the unnecessary and unwarranted "Apostle Yudkowsky (prophet of the Singularity God)" stuff amounts to indirectly insulting the people you're talking with and, makes them far less likely to realize that you're actually also saying something sensible. If you want to get your points across, as opposed to just enjoying a feeling of smug moral superiority while getting downvoted into oblivion, I strongly recommend leaving that stuff out.

Consider the double standard involved. Yudkowsky lambasts "philosophers" and their "confusions"--their supposedly misguided concerns with the issues other philosophers have commented on to the detriment of inquiry. Has Yudkowsky read even a single book by each of the philosophers he dismisses?

Some of them are simply not great writers. Hegel for example is just awful- the few coherent ideas in Hegel are more usefully described by other later writers. There's also a strange aspect to this in that you are complaining about Eliezer not having read books while simultaneously defending your criticism of Eliezer's metaethics positions without having read all his posts. Incidentally, if one wants to criticize Eliezer's level of knowledge of philosophy, a better point is not so much the philosophers that he criticizes without reading, but rather his lack of knowledge of relevant philosophers that Eliezer seems unaware of, many of whom would agree with some of his points. Quine and Lakatos are the most obvious ones.

Here there are vague allusions to what the Apostle Yudkowsky (prophet of the Singularity God) "answered" without any substance. An objective reader will conclude that the Prophet stands naked; the prolixity is probably intended to discourage criticism.

I strongly suspect that your comments would be responded to more positively if they didn't frequently end with this sort of extreme rhetoric that has more emotional content than rational dialogue. It is particularly a problem because on theLW interface, the up/down buttons are at the end of everything one has read, so what the last sentences say may have a disproportionate impact on whether people upvote or downvote and what they focus on in their replies.

Frankly, you have some valid points, but they are getting lost in the rhetoric. We know that you think that LW pattern matches to religion. Everyone gets the point. You don't need to repeat that every single time you make a criticism.

I'm not saying he's right, just that your proposed alternative isn't even wrong.

You seem to be confusing "language relative" with "non-mathematical." Kolmogorov Complexity is "language-relative," if I'm understanding you right; specifically, it's relative (if I'm using the terminology right?) to a Turing Machine. This was not relevant to Eliezer's point, so it was not addressed.

(Incidentally, this is a perfect example of you "hold{ing} views contrary to scientific consensus in specialized fields where {you} lack expert knowledge based on pure ratiocination," since Kolmogorov Complexity is "one of the fundamental concepts of theoretical computer science", you seemingly lack expert knowledge since you don't recognize these terms, and your argument seems to be based on pure ratiocination.)

When I read that line for the first time, I understood it. Between our two cases, the writing was the same, but the reader was different. Thus, the writing cannot be the sole cause of our different outcomes.

The philosophizing of inept, verbose writers like Yudkowsky can be safely dismissed based solely on their incompetence as writers. For a succinct defense of this contention, see my "Can bad writers be good thinkers? Part 1 of THE UNITY OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT" OR see the 3-part "Writing & Thought series" — all together, fewer than 3,000 words.